President Joe Biden wants to undo a bank deregulation bill that passed under former President Donald Trump, but without actually repealing the legislation.
In 2018, Congress relaxed rules that were enacted in response to the financial crisis a decade earlier ― despite explicit warnings that doing so would increase the risk of bank failures. Now that two banks have indeed failed, prompting a dramatic government intervention to bail out the banks’ depositors, the White House wants regulators to put the rules back in place without any action from a divided Democratic Party or an even more divided Congress.
“I don’t want today’s actions to be taken to mean no congressional action is necessary,” a White House official told reporters on a conference call Thursday.
Major congressional action in response to the banking crisis looks unlikely. While Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and other progressives would prefer to overturn the 2018 deregulation entirely, dozens of Democrats who…
